Hampstead – or Gospel Oak?

THE new press complaints adjudicator IPSO has found the Hampstead and Highgate Express didn’t do anything wrong when it published a story earlier this year about a primary school pupil being referred to an anti-terror unit amid apparent fears about the risk of radicalisation. In the end the concerns proved unfounded, but not before the issue had been discussed in the open forum of a meeting at the Town Hall.

The school involved, Fleet, was not happy and its chair of governors Dr Kim Issrof filed a run of complaints to IPSO. This may sound like honour among thieves, but one of the charges, at least, seems a bit of a reach: The H&H had written that Fleet in Fleet Road was in Hampstead, but Dr Issrof regards the school to be in Gospel Oak.

IPSO said of the complaint: “She said that the school was located in Gospel Oak, not Hampstead, and the newspaper had only referred to the school being in Hampstead in order to sensationalise the story by reporting that such an incident had occurred in a ‘rich, liberal, middle-class’ area.”

This was an easy one to bat away for the newspaper up the road. For if you look at the school’s own website, the address it gives is: